Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

by Kim Zetter

The military already had its first taste of their capabilities in the 1980s, when a German named Markus Hess, who was reportedly recruited by the KGB, hacked into hundreds of military systems and research facilities, such as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in search of intelligence about satellites and the Star Wars defense system.3 Other scares followed. In 1990 in the run-up to the first Gulf War, Dutch teens broke into nearly three-dozen US military computers seeking information about Patriot missiles, nuclear weapons, and the operation against Iraq. Officials feared the teens planned to sell the intelligence to Iraq. Then in 1994, a sixteen-year-old British hacker, mentored by a twenty-one-year-old in Wales, breached US Air Force systems and used them to hack into a South Korean nuclear research institute, as well as attacking one hundred other victims. With the breach appearing to come from US military computers, it became clear that the potential consequences of such intrusions weren’t limited to intelligence theft.